Action, Transference, and Resistance: Some Reflections on a Paradox at the Heart of Analytic Technique

You might say that a therapist “does” an interpretation on his patient to make him react some way.

Consider the following situation: Two people contract to do something together, with one well aware that what the other seeks is neither fully known nor knowable in the beginning and, in either case, not at all what he or she intends to provide. I am, of course, describing the analyst and analysand and the radical differences that inevitably arise between their various goals for the treatment. The tensions that develop as their dysjunction of aims becomes increasingly apparent will help drive the process of the analysis. Indeed, in one sense, these tensions will contribute to the very sum and substance of what is to be analyzed—the transference neurosis. The fact that the analytic situation is constructed in just this way—to activate in analyst and analysand the very wishes that the analyst will attempt to refuse to gratify—leads both participants into the labyrinth of frustrated desire that has helped earn psychoanalysis the reputation of being “the impossible profession.” It is in this sense that the psychoanalytic situation is born of paradox, and it is only fitting that